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Back in the “old days” when I was on a team supporting hundreds of servers we would occasionally encounter an issue that we just couldn’t figure out. We were lucky then to have a third level team we could call who had a direct link to Microsoft for support, no questions asked, no credit card required.

We would call them up, or fill in the form on the support website, and a triage tech would call to take some information and then a tech would call. The tech would send us a link and have us download a tool that we would run on the server. The Microsoft Product Support Report Tool would run and gather up, into one tidy package, all of the many logs and settings found on the server and wrap it up ready for delivery to the tech for analysis. We would then be provided with a temporary ftp address where we would send the package. The tech would take a look, stir with whatever magic diagnostic wands they had at their disposal, and provide us with a summary of what they had found. If the results didn’t tell us exactly what the problem was it would often give us a pointer to the direction we should be looking for a possible solution.

That’s gone now.

What you have now is something equally useful and interesting. The Microsoft Support Diagnostics portal gives you pages and pages of typical items that might require diagnosis ranging from Baseline analysis, Exchange Server, IIS diagnosis, Windows Server diagnosis and almost everything else under the Microsoft sun.

So it works like this. You browse to the portal and login with your Microsoft Live ID. Now that you’re logged in browse through the pages of options to find the diagnostics selection you need. You run through the diagnostic process and upload the results. The upload is analyzed and you get feedback that gives you an idea of what is wrong and how to go about fixing it. A handy resource.

I was tasked with doing some upgrades for a client in their Configuration Manager 2012 environment recently. They wanted the SQL database on the back end upgraded to something more recent so SQL Server 2012 it is. So we confirmed we met all of the software prerequisites and began the upgrade. Setup Support Rules were happy.

Look at all those green check marks!

All of the features were auto-populated showing that they were already installed and supported. We confirmed we had adequate disk space, more little green check marks.

Many more little green check marks.

The Upgrade Rules were checked and many more little green check marks were displayed and now we’re ready to upgrade.

Ready, Set, Go!

The process begins, everything looks happy, the upgrade appears to be proceeding as planned and then this happened.

Ouch, so much red it makes my eyes hurt.

So we reviewed the logs, double-checked the prerequisites yet again, searched and researched to see if we could find out what was missing. No luck looking at entries in the log files so I did a quick search using “an error occurred for a dependency of the feature” and came across this which pointed to an already installed SQL Server 2012 component, the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Native Client. It may have been installed as part of the SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Advisor which seems odd but I was a bit surprised that the rule checks didn’t flag the item when all the little green checks came up. All’s well that ends well. We removed the native client, reran the installation process and SQL Server 2008 R2 was successfully upgraded to SQL Server 2012.